Gone By Morning
by SnowPrincessMossy
Summary: A quiet summer evening is destroyed when a bullet shatters their living room window. His life is turned upside down that night and he must learn to live without her, for the sake of their children. But how can he when he can't help but see memories with her everywhere he turns?
1. Gone By Morning

Hey look I still exist and write once in a while. Side note: Jean Havoc grew up in the same town as Riza Hawkeye in this fic.

 **Disclaimer! I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist**

* * *

It was a quiet evening in late summer. The air was hot and still, but the fan in the window, with its quiet roar, kept the house comfortable. It was late, the light was almost gone from the sky, and all good children were comfortably tucked into bed while parents sipped drinks and talked or listened to the radio.

The Mustang household was no different. Their two girls were fast asleep in their beds and Roy and Riza sat at the table organizing their papers for the next day while they sipped on some whiskey. Black Hayate lay quietly by Riza's feet, snoring softly. It was a nice evening despite the turmoil at work.

Fuhrer Grumman had died a year ago and the peace in the land had begun to turn into unrest. The new fuhrer had his work cut out for him, and all of the higher ups were working to help settle the unrest of the people.

Riza looked up from her papers, and glanced out the window. Something about the motion seemed off, she was far too rigid and alert to be simply enjoying the sight of the last few rays of sun for the night. Hayate woke up and looked out the window, a low growl in his throat.

"What's wro-"

"Get down!" Riza shouted, cutting off Roy's question. She lunged forward, knowing that Roy was slow when confused, and shoved Roy backwards.

The world seemed to proceed in slow motion from there. A shot rang out as Riza's hands hit his shoulders, and then he was falling backwards. The window shattered, showering them both in glass.

Riza drew a sharp breath.

Hayate barked menacingly.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close to him to protect her from the bullet. But he was too late. He felt hot sticky blood flowing down his arm already. He rolled as they hit the ground, trying desperately to find the bullet wound with his hand to stem the flow of blood.

Riza's breathing was ragged and labored. The bullet had gone through her lung and she would not be long for this world.

"Roy," She breathed, voice hoarse from lack of breath, "The girls."

"They know what to do," Roy replied, blood seeping through his fingers and his panic rising as he watched the color fade from his wife's face.

She nodded once, slowly, closing her eyes and letting out a sigh. She never opened her eyes again.

The rest of the night passed in a blur. He sat frozen in shock with his dead wife's body cradled against his own. He didn't notice as her blood spilled over his clothes, staining them red. He didn't hear the muffled whimpers of his children in their bedroom, hiding under one of the beds as they had been told to do in case of a shooting. He only vaguely noticed Hayate's whimpers as he nudged his master's hand with his nose.

He didn't move until the MPs came through the front door, led by Jean Havoc and Kain Fuery. Hayate yipped at them but didn't leave his fallen master's side.

Roy's eyes flashed upwards, dark and stormy until he saw that it was friend, not foe, that stood in the doorway.

Jean gasped, taking in the scene before him. Broken glass littered the whole room and gleamed in the light. The table lay on its side on the floor behind Roy, who sat in a puddle of blood, his usually crisp white shirt wrinkled and bloodstained. Riza was clutched to his chest, but she was deathly pale and Jean had to bite his tongue against the emotions that rose in his throat for his lost friend.

Kain came to his senses first. "Where are the girls, Roy?" he asked.

Roy didn't trust his voice just yet, but he answered his subordinate by glancing towards the back bedroom. Kain nodded and headed towards the bedroom, beckoning for Hayate to follow him. The black and white dog did follow Kain with great hesitation. Meanwhile, a handful MPs scattered throughout the room, taking in the scene in great detail.

The rest of the night passed in a blur. Roy moved robotically, his mind numbed by shock as he answered all of the MPs questions and packed his bags. He and the girls were to be taken into protective custody immediately. Jean had reminded him to change his clothes so that he wouldn't scare the girls any more than they already were. Hayate spend the rest of the night glued to Kain's side, though he howled when he saw the MPs take his master's body away.

Roy spent the night fighting back tears as his girls cried for their lost mother. They eventually fell into an uneasy sleep, tiny fists wrapped up in their father's shirt, his arms wrapping them close to his sides to fend off any monsters that may rear their ugly heads in the night.

They boarded the train early the next morning with Jean Havoc and Kain Fuery, who were assigned to stay with them for protection. Maeve still clung to her father's shirt. Christina, shorter than her sister, couldn't quite reach and so settled instead for clinging to her father's pant leg. Hayate whined and nudged Kain's knee with his nose. Roy didn't recognize the name of the small town they were going to, but many towns had changed their names since the fall of Fuhrer Bradley, and so many town names were unfamiliar. All he knew is that they were headed out to a small town in the east where there was a house he could stay in with plenty of room for him, the girls, and his guards.

The train ride was quiet, everyone still processing their grief for their lost friend, wife, and mother. The girls would occasionally sniffle, and Roy would pull them closer to him so they could bury their faces in his chest, the only comfort he could offer them as he fought back tears himself. Hayate whined occasionally and Kain shushed him with a handful of dog treats and comforting pats.

When the train finally arrived at their destination the men gathered their bags, and Hayate's leash, in a flurry and stepped off the train. Something like a memory gnawed at the back of Roy's mind as he stepped off the train, but he couldn't place it until he stepped out of the train station onto the main street of town. Realization hit him in the face like a brick and he stopped dead in his tracks, as did Jean. Kain, not paying attention, crashed into Roy's back.

"Oh," Jean breathed.

"What is it?" Kain asked, picking up his glasses, which had fallen off his face when he crashed into Roy's back, "Do you two know this town?"

"Yeah," Roy breathed, his voice low, "This is where Riza grew up."

"Oh," Kain said.

"Jean, please tell me, this house we're supposed to be staying at," Roy said with strained voice, the end of his question not needing to be spoken.

"It was donated to the military as a safe house when Grumman was Fuhrer," Jean stated, "I think it might be..."

"Of course," Roy breathed, "Of course. She said she donated the house to her grandfather."

"What?" Kain asked, but his question was ignored as the other two men began walking, the two little girls and suitcases in tow. Hayate whimpered and exchanged a glance with Kain, who shrugged at the dog and hurried to catch up with the others.

"This is it," Jean said, double checking the address on his paper.

"Of course," Roy said again.

"What?" Kain asked, "What's going on? You two know this house?"

"This is the house that Riza grew up in," Roy said, eyes glued to the old looking mansion of a house. His face was pale, like he was watching ghosts of the past in the dusty windows.

"Oh," Kain breathed, the full weight of understanding falling on his shoulders, "Oh."


	2. When the Tears Came

Jean and Kain decided to go into town to get some groceries while Roy and the girls got settled into the house.

"This house smells like dust, Daddy," said Maeve, his oldest daughter.

"Mmhmm!" Agreed his younger daughter, Christina. Both girls had their hands gripping onto Roy's pockets as they walked through the living room. Black Hayate snuffled and sneezed as he explored the room.

The girls hadn't let go of their father since they had got into the military van last night. A part of him was glad of it. It kept him grounded to have their hands holding him to the earth. Even if he did have to keep pulling his pants up.

"It's been a long time since anyone lived here," Roy explained to his children in a quiet voice.

Roy looked around the room. The furniture was covered by dust covers, but the shapes still looked familiar. Through the door into the dining room he could see a familiar oval table covered in the same faded tablecloth he remembered being there the last time he had been in the house. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, and as the trio shuffled forward dust came up in clouds around their feet, causing Christina to cough.

Hayate looked up in alarm at the noise and padded over to the trio. The black and white dog loved both girls, and tried as best he could to keep them happy and healthy despite being a dog.

Roy turned and picked Christina up, resting her on his hip and waved dismissively at Hayate to tell him that Christina was alright.

"Do you girls want to choose a bedroom?" Roy asked.

The girls nodded in unison, little smiles creeping onto their faces.

"There are lots to choose from," Roy said, feeling a smile of his own creep onto his face as he led the way, Christina still resting against his hip, down the hallway past the stairs to the bedrooms that may have at one time housed servants. When Roy had been in the house years before, the rightmost bedroom had been Master Hawkeye's study, and Roy suspected that it still contained alchemy texts, so he left that door closed. Opening the other doors revealed three rooms full of dusty boxes lined along the wall opposite the door, and a single dusty bed sat against the wall adjacent to the door. Each room also had a closet that was also full of dusty boxes.

The girls were not impressed by these rooms, so Roy led them up the stairs to the upstairs bedrooms. Roy noticed as he climbed the stairs that a good deal more of them creaked now than had when he had last lived in the house.

The rightmost bedroom upstairs was the master bedroom, and so the door remained closed. The next bedroom stood empty, the bedroom beside that had been Riza's childhood bedroom. Hayate took particular interest in this room, snuffling loudly and sneezing hard as the thick dust clogged his nose. The bedroom sat exactly as it had twenty years earlier, with the exception of a thick layer of dust that covered everything in this room as it had in the previous rooms. A chair still sat beside the bed, with a well-used candle on the bedside table.

Roy grimaced when he saw it, remembering long nights in that chair trying to decipher the secrets of fire alchemy from the tattoo on Riza's back. She obviously hadn't spent many nights in this bed after he had left to go to the war.

The last bedroom at the end of the hall had been his own during his apprenticeship, and the room looked just as he had left it, the bed made neatly and the closet empty save for an extra thick blanket folded on the top shelf.

"Can we share a room, Daddy?" Maeve asked, tugging on Roy's shirt to draw his attention away from his memories.

"Yes, Maeve," Roy said, "Which room would you two like?"

"That one," they girls said in unison, pointing towards the room that had been Riza's in the past.

"Of course," Roy sighed, "It's all yours, girls. We will try to get another bed in there soon."

"It's 'kay, Daddy," Christina said, "We can share."

"Yeah," Maeve agreed.

"Ok," Roy smiled, "You can share for now then. Let's see if we can find something to clean up some of this dust."

* * *

By the time that Jean and Kain returned to the house with armloads of groceries, Roy and the girls had found a vacuum cleaner and were attacking the thick layer of dust in the living room, having already cleaned the kitchen and dining room. The girls were both armed with rags and were furiously scrubbing the coffee table while Roy sucked up dust from the floor and furniture. Hayate sat by the couch, supervising the cleaning team.

"Good idea, Chief," Jean said, closing the front door behind him with his foot.

* * *

The rest of the evening was spent cleaning up dust, stocking the refrigerator, and finding out what was in the house and what they would have to buy in the next few days.

That night they all retired to their respective rooms, tired from a day of travelling and cleaning. Roy and the girls slept in rooms upstairs, the girls in their chosen room; the one that their mother had grown up in, and Roy in the room he had slept in as an apprentice. Hayate curled up at the foot of Roy's bed. Jean and Kain slept in separate rooms downstairs.

Nobody had touched the room that had once been the study or the boxes that lined the walls in the downstairs rooms.

Roy knew that the first night all alone would be hard. He knew that he was just torturing himself by sleeping in the same room he had slept in as an apprentice. But for some reason he had chosen this room anyway. So far he had managed to hold himself together. He had managed to stem the tears that had been threatening him since he had felt the life drain out of his wife's body. He had held himself together, however numb his body felt doing it, to stay strong for his daughters, to show them that everything would be alright even if he wasn't so sure himself that it would be now that she was gone. But now, lying alone in a bed that was far too familiar, the tears finally came. And when they came, they were anything but silent. They wracked his whole body until his muscles were sore and his tears ran dry and he fell into an uneasy slumber, dreaming of gunshots heard too late and glass shattering, falling around him like the rest of his life.


	3. Hell Exists

He woke late in the night, cold and sweaty and grasping for someone he knew wasn't there. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and the familiar and yet unfamiliar room became more visible in the dark and the tears came again. They came again in big wracking coughs that hurt his chest and throat until he again exhausted himself and fell back into a restless sleep filled with nightmares.

He woke again in the early morning to the soft sounds of little feet and a tug at his elbow. Both girls crawled into bed next to him when he pulled the covers up to invite them in.

But this time he lay awake, unable to go back to sleep. He tucked his girls in, wrapping his arms around them to fend off their nightmares.

He stared at the ceiling, eyes tracing patterns on the ceiling that he vaguely remembered from his teenage years. He remembered other endless nights spend staring at this ceiling, though his heart then was never filled with the sadness he felt now. His sleepless nights in this bed had always been due to excitement or because his mind wouldn't stop racing with equations and circles.

But he wasn't thirteen years old anymore, and his teacher's daughter wasn't sleeping soundly in the next room over, and his teacher wasn't creeping quietly down the stairs to hole up in his study with a pot of coffee and his notes.

Instead, he was lying in this bed, holding his two daughters close to him while he listened to their muffled, sleepy cries as they dreamed of gunshots and men in blue taking their mother away in a body bag. His wife's dog lay at his feet, curled in a tight ball and sleeping soundly. His friends downstairs slept in their own beds, beds that had lain empty for decades, sleeping with one ear and eye open as they had learned to do long ago.

He lay awake for hours, watching as the light of the sunrise started to filter through the dusty blinds in the window.

He gave up on sleeping as the pink light of the sunrise fell across his face. Quietly he untangled himself from the blankets and his sleeping daughters, shushing their whimpers of protest and tucking them back into his bed securely before padding to the door. Hayate huffed at the disturbance, but then crawled up the bed to settle himself beside Christina, the youngest of the girls. Roy glanced once more at his girls and smiled at Hayate as he quietly closed the bedroom door behind him.

Roy crept down the hallway as quietly as he could, expertly avoiding the seventh, fifth, and second stair that had always creaked horribly when he was younger. Unfortunately, he was unable to miss the ninth and third stair, which had developed a creak in the years of disuse. He paused at the bottom of the staircase, listening hard to ensure he hadn't woken anyone who was still sleeping. When he hadn't heard anything in several seconds he decided it was safe to continue.

Once in the kitchen, Roy looked through the cupboards until he found the tea kettle and a mug. His mug. The mug that Riza had always given him when he was her father's apprentice. A sandy colored mug with a herd of wild Ishvalan horses running together around it. After a quick cleaning he filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove to boil.

While he waited for the water to boil, he stared out the kitchen window. The pink sunrise was starting to fade into an orange glow that promised that the day would be a hot one. The yard was overgrown with weeds, and the grass was dry and brown from the summer's heat. At the edge of the yard, the forest that had always edged the property was still there, but he couldn't see the entrance to the path that lead to the clearing where he and Riza had spent countless hours.

Roy was pulled from his thoughts by the whispering start of the tea kettle's whistle. He jumped, pulling the kettle off the stove before it began to scream. He poured the hot water into his mug and found a tea bag from the groceries Jean and Kain had bought the night before so he could have a nice cup of tea.

He sat at the table in the dining room and sipped hot tea from his mug while he stared into the kitchen. He had intended to compile list of all the things that needed to be done during the day, but instead found his mind wandering.

" _Mr. Mustang!" She squeaked when she saw him at the bottom of the stairs, "I'm sorry, I thought you were still asleep. Would you like some tea? Or toast?"_

 _He blinked sleepily while she jumped out of her chair, hurrying to put the kettle on the stove and bread into the toaster._

" _Go ahead and sit down, it'll be ready in a moment."_

 _He nodded dumbly and sat at the seat opposite the one she had just left. He noticed that she had a half eaten piece of toast with strawberry jam and a cup of tea sitting beside a tattered textbook._

" _I could have waited you know," He said as she handed him a steaming mug of tea, "Now your toast will be cold."_

 _She shook her head at him, "Strawberry jam or marmalade?"_

 _He sighed, "Strawberry jam."_

 _She nodded and pulled the jam jar out of the fridge._

 _While she spread jam on his toast, he glanced at her textbook. Amestrian history. It was open to a page that listed all the important battles at the border they shared with Drachma._

 _Riza placed his toast and jam in front of him and slid back into her seat at the table, burying her nose in the textbook as she took a bite of her own toast._

" _History, huh?" He asked conversationally._

" _Yes," She murmured, not taking her eyes off of the text._

 _He opened his mouth to ask another question when her eyes snapped up to meet his._

" _Don't you have an alchemy report to be writing?" She asked, eyes boring into him like daggers, "You won't last long here if you slack off. Father doesn't like lazy apprentices."_

 _He shut his mouth and nodded._

Jean Havoc stood in the hallway watching his superior and friend sipping tea from a mug. He could tell from here that Roy's mind wasn't in the present. His heart ached. It was cruel, and yet somehow fitting that they had ended up in the old Hawkeye Manor as a safe house. Like the walls of Riza's childhood home could somehow protect them even when she herself could no longer do so.

Jean smirked ruefully at the thought.


	4. Don't Move

The summer sun had barely risen and Roy and Jean were the only ones awake in the house, and yet the kitchen was already a flurry of activity. Jean had managed to pull Roy from his thoughts and convinced the other man to help him clean out the kitchen cupboards.

"Did she take anything out of the house when she left for the academy?" Jean asked, pulling an old mug out of the cupboard.

"I don't think so," Roy said, shaking his head.

"Was this yours, Chief?" Jean asked, holding out a red mug with a white and gold intricately painted horse wrapped around it.

"No," Roy said with a smile, "That was hers."

 _He had been Master Hawkeye's apprentice for almost two months when it happened. He was about halfway down the stairs when he heard an almighty crash in the kitchen. He leapt down the rest of the stairs two at a time and slid into the kitchen. There he was greeted by a mess. Ceramic shards littered the floor around a chair that lay on its side, trapping young Riza Hawkeye beneath it against the wall._

" _Don't move!" He yelled to the girl._

" _Mr. Mustang!" She groaned, and struggled to life the heavy chair off of her chest._

" _Don't move," He growled, "I'll help you."_

 _He grabbed the broom that stood by the fridge and quickly swept the ceramic shards to one side of the kitchen so he could walk safely to help Riza out from under the chair. He strode over and lifted the chair._

" _Are you ok?" He asked, as he set the chair back on its feet._

" _Yes," She replied, sitting up and rubbing her ribs, "I'm fine, thank you."_

" _Are you sure?" He asked, "That chair is pretty heavy."_

" _Yes," She said, but she grimaced when she saw the ceramic shards pushed up under the counter._

" _What happened?" He asked, offering the girl his hand as she went to stand up._

" _I slipped," She said, ignoring his offered hand for help to stand, "And knocked my mug off the counter. I just needed the serving dish off the top shelf, but now that's broken too."_

 _Roy looked at the shards of ceramic on the floor, recognizing the red and gold from her usual tea cup mixing with a tan ceramic that was decorated with tiny leaves and fragile pink flowers._

" _I can fix that," He said, "Just give me a second."_

 _She watched in confusion as he dug in his pocket and fished out a piece of chalk. He drew what Riza recognized as an alchemical circle on the floor and set to work separating out the shards of the serving dish from the mug. Luckily for him, they were differently colored so the work was easy enough. With two flashes of light he had repaired the mug and the serving dish, and earned himself a smile of thanks from Riza._

Jean nodded and set the mug on the counter, "We may need a few more mugs, there aren't many here."

"There weren't many people living here," Roy scoffed, "There was no need for many mugs before. But yes, we should pick some up at the store later."


End file.
